1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to procurement processes. More particularly, the present invention relates to a virtual procurement folder which stores all of the records, decisions, quotes, and other procurement information generated during a procurement process.
2. Description of the Related Art
Procurement is the process of acquiring goods and services required to sustain an organization's activities. In the public sector, for example, the individuals involved in this process generally include government employees who act as buyers, vendors who act as sellers, procurement officers who act as facilitators, and citizens who act as observers. Each of these actors has four primary goals for the procurement process: that the process be timely, efficient, value-maximizing, and fair.
FIG. 1 shows the stages and sequential flow of a procurement process according to the prior art. As shown in FIG. 1, the procurement process usually begins at requisition stage 5. A requisition is a document used by buyers within an organization to request that goods or services identified in the requisition be purchased on their behalf by a procurement officer. The procurement officer solicits the marketplace to determine which vendor or vendors can supply the goods or services described in the requisition.
Once one or more vendors are identified, the vendors are sent a solicitation document at solicitation stage 10, identifying the requirements for the goods or services supplied in the requisition document. The solicitation document invites the vendors to put a price on the goods or services. Or, alternately, the solicitation document invites the vendors to supply alternate substitute goods or services other than the ones described in the solicitation.
The identified vendors then prepare bid responses to the solicitation at bid response stage 15. Bid responses generally contain information such as a vendor's proposed price and the time to delivery of the items listed in the solicitation.
The procurement officer next evaluates all of the bid responses sent by the vendors at evaluation stage 20. The procurement officer generally scores each vendor based upon any number of pre-selected criteria, and selects a vendor to supply the requested goods or services.
The procurement officer, acting as an agent of the organization, awards the determined vendor a contractual document known an award at award stage 25. The award sets out the price of the requested goods or services. The award further details the legal obligations of the organization, acting as a buyer of the requested goods or services, and details the legal obligations of the selected vendor, acting as a seller of the requested goods or services.
After the award contract has been signed by the organization and the selected vendor, the vendor delivers the now contracted-for goods or services to the organization. When the organization receives goods, the organization makes a recording as to what is being received from the vendor, and optionally, the organization may inspect the delivered goods. Next, the awarded contracting vendor is paid. Safeguards are usually in place which make sure the vendor is authorized to be paid.
At contract management stage 30 of the procurement process, the progress of the execution of the award contract is carried out by the management of the many different documents associated with the execution of the award contract.
Existing procurement solutions to the above-described procurement process are neither timely nor efficient. For instance, current existing procurement solutions include manual paper based processes whereby each stage of the procurement process has different paper forms, and a lot of time is spent copying similar data between the forms, such as manually copying item procurement specifications from the requisition document to the solicitation document. Further, much time is wasted tracking where data originated from, what stage a procurement is in, and why particular decisions were made.
Even existing automated solutions are neither timely nor efficient. Furthermore, existing automated solutions limit users to a sequential processing of procurement documents (e.g. a requisition document must first be created, then a solicitation document must next be created, etc.) which limits the situations in which existing automated solutions may be applied.
For example, suppose an important bridge washes out, and gravel needs to be procured to fix the bridge. The Governor of the state in which the bridge is located signs an emergency declaration circumventing the normal rules of fair-play and proper vendor selection, and authorizes the state government to immediately evaluate bid responses. In this scenario, the government's preferred procurement process would circumvent the time consuming requisition and solicitation stages of the procurement process, and would instead jump immediately to the bid response stage to ultimately determine the gravel company which can deliver the needed supplies to the bridge in the most expedient manner possible. This way, the bridge may be repaired in the shortest amount of time possible. Existing automated solutions are not capable of handling this scenario because of their aforementioned sequential nature.
As a further example, suppose an organization goes through most of the stages of the procurement process (requisition, solicitation, bid response, evaluation to choose a vendor, and award) and then the chosen vendor goes out of business. The end-user of existing automated procurement systems must go back to the beginning stage (requisition) and go through each procurement stage in turn before a new vendor may be awarded a contract, even though it would be more expedient for the end-user to go directly to the bid-evaluation stage in order to select a new vendor.
Additionally, both existing manual and automated solutions create a document trail which inevitably becomes unwieldy, due to the number of documents, decisions, quotes, and other procurement information generated during a procurement process.
Therefore, a need exists for a procurement system that stores all of the records, decisions, quotes, and other procurement information generated during a procurement process as a single entity, and that allows for an end-user to jump from one procurement stage to another in a non-sequential manner.